Intel added three curious ultra-low voltage chips to its official price list over the weekend and their official designations have us baffled.

All three are 22nm parts and their product numbers are N2805, N2810 and N2910, which seems to indicate that they are Atoms, but they are listed in the ULV Celeron M section, reports CPU World. The top SKU features four cores with no hyperthreading, which means that it is probably based on the new Valley View M core.

The N2805 is a dual-core clocked at 1.46GHz, with a single megabyte of cache. The N2810 is also a dual-core, but it’s clocked at 2GHz, while the N2910 is the previously mentioned quad-core, with 2MB of cache and a clock speed of 1.6GHz. All of them are priced at $132, which sounds like way too much for Atom branded parts.

With Temash and Kabini just around the corner, Intel needs to step up its game in the low-end low-voltage market fast, but at this point it seems that AMD be the first to market and it will enjoy at least a few months on top. Even when Intel launches its first 22nm Atoms, it won’t have an easy time matching AMD’s price or performance.

Valley View is a 22nm Atom meant for the Bay Trail platform. It is based on 22nm Silvermont cores and with new microarchitecture it has a fighting chance against the growing threat of ARM tablet chips.

Silvermont cores also feature much faster execution and they can match up to four cores. The 22nm Atom comes in a nettop HTPC flavour, value mobile, ultra mobile as well as micro server, network and communications part codenamed Avoton and Rangley.

The micro server part comes with up to eight cores and will compete with new ARM based micro server chips. Since Intel has been doing servers for a long time, it has been said that this versions will be extremely competitive to ARM chips.

Furthermore we have learned that Silvermont 22nm Atoms will give all ARM chips a good run for their money in most markets including tablets, netbooks, nettops and servers. This comes as a surprise, as there is a general (mis)conception that ARM makes better low power chips, but with 22nm Atoms this can change to Intel's advantage.

It will at least make Intel more competitive that it is today and help Intel gain some popularity against the ARM alliance. Powerful ARM chips such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 and Nvidia’s Tegra 4 that can cause some damage to Intel’s sales in entry level market, especially in the tablet space.

Valley View, Intel’s future SoC platform, should deliver significant performance gains over existing chips and thanks to CPU World, we have some gritty and geeky details.

The chips will be based on the new Silvermont architecture, with out-of-order execution and 7th generation Ivy Bridge class graphics. Unlike previous Atom architectures, some Valley View SKUs will be quad core parts, but most should stick to two cores.

The new architecture will target multiple markets, including smartphones, tablets, mobile and desktop. Of course, there will also be a number of embedded parts and the latest leak deals with them, but it gives us a rough idea of what to expect on other fronts.

Embedded chips will feature a dual-channel memory controller, 1MB of L2 cache and there will be three SKUs, all clocked at 1.7GHz or faster. The top quad-core SKU will support Burst technology with a top frequency of 1.9GHz, all in a 12W TDP envelope. The two other SKUs will have a TDP of 10W or lower.

The entry level part is a single-core clocked at 1.3GHz to 1.6GHz. The mid range SKU is a dual-core clocked at 1.2GHz to 1.5GHz, with graphics capable of hitting 533MHz. The top SKU is a quad-core clocked at 1.7GHz to 2GHz, with a 700MHz GPU clock.

The base graphics clock for all three chips is 300MHz, but bear in mind that we are dealing with embedded chips, which usually don’t need fast graphics. It is possible that they are downclocked for the sake of efficiency and we could see higher clocks in SKUs designed for the consumer market.

Intel’s next generation Valley View atom should sample by the end of next year and the chip should feature some very interesting specs.

Based on Intel’s next generation Silvermont architecture, the new 22nm parts will be available in single, dual and quad core versions. Clocks should range from 1.4GHz to 2.4GHz and the new chips will feature Ivy Bridge class graphics, which are supposedly four to seven times faster than the SGX 535 cores uses in current generation Atoms.

All this sounds quite nice for an entry level platform. Mind you, Intel introduced the original Atom back in 2008, as a dirt cheap single-core alternative in the low end. With quad core chips on the way, with decent clocks and graphics, Valley View could transform Atom into much more than a no frills chip for bargain hunters.

Back in march we mentioned that Intel plans to kill its 13W Atom D2700 in Q3 2012. You can find the original piece here.

Intel has obviously decided that there is simply not enough room for a 2.13GHz clocked dual-core Atom and the Atom D2550 will take over as the fastest Atom processor, clocked at 1.86GHz clock. This processor will have to deal with Windows 8 and should last until it gets replaced with next generation Atom, probably a 22nm part codenamed Valley View.

The D2550 supports four treads while its predecessor Atom D2500 has the same 1.86GHz clock, same 1MB cache, same 10W TDP, but it has 400MHz graphics instead of 640MHz on the D2550.

The D2550 also supports Blu-Ray 2.0 that for some reason plays a big role for Intel. It will look good as a sticker on a box. It remains unclear why Intel decided to kill off the D2700 13W processor as we haven’t seen such an approach on Intel’s part before.

The official price for the Atom D2550 today is (not so cheap) $47 listed at the official price list.

According to a recent discovery by the folks over at Phoronix, Intel is currently developing a 32nm Atom SoC with very promising integration of an Ivy Bridge-based graphics core capable of supporting DirectX 11 and two DisplayPort panels, among a number of other features.

Intel's 32nm Atom SoC with Ivy Bridge graphics core is codenamed "Valley View" and marks a departure from the company's traditional push to integrate PowerVR-based graphics cores in its Atom processors. The discovery of this chip was made by Intel's Open Source Technology Center releasing a set of 25 driver patches for hardware vendors to begin testing their latest developments on new Linux kernel releases in the open-source world.

Nevertheless, Intel's 32nm Valley View is a dual-core Atom chip with support for two DisplayPort monitors, one HDMI panel, DirectX 11 support and OpenCL support. It also features a new interrupt architecture and has a different Turbo Boost interface distinct from Intel's acutal Ivy Bridge-based processors (probably more suited for ultra low voltage environments).

The new low-power chip family is expected to be paired with Intel's Balboa Pier chipset and will be launched as Intel's next-generation 32nm Atom platform sometime at the very end of 2012 or the first half of 2013.